


things fall apart (three futures for the Doctor and the Master that were collapsed by a shot)

by Raven (singlecrow)



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-20
Updated: 2009-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-04 18:50:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/33016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singlecrow/pseuds/Raven
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>History.</p>
            </blockquote>





	things fall apart (three futures for the Doctor and the Master that were collapsed by a shot)

History has a habit of unfolding, over and over. Bullets have it in them, in the sleek lines and curves of them, to burst through skin and sinew, bubble through flesh and blood. Revenge is served up, at the ends of things. And futures have a tendency to collapse.

*

_i. the end_

The only place he'll be safe, the Doctor had said, is with me. So they're safe. Around them, they have silence, the echoing spaces of the TARDIS; around that, the echoing spaces of the universe. The stars have burned and died out, entropy unwinds to the last threads. The ship drifts, aimless. The Doctor wanders lonely as an old, old ghost. The Master reads and lets pages drop.

During what passes for day, artificial, last-chance electric, they are silent. At night, they sleep together, on the same bed, six-and-half inches apart. They aren't much, but they're all that is left.

*

_ii. the beginning_

At first the Doctor saves planets and the Master snarls; the Master enslaves planets and the Doctor snarls; they bicker, and they shout, and they are the last representatives of an old and ancient race, and they steal each other's teaspoons.

On a little planet that looks a little, but not quite, almost unlike Gallifrey, with burnt orange skies and silver forests, they go out for a wander handcuffed together, and on a hill not at all like one from the distant past, they watch a sun not much like the stars of Kasterborous descend into glorious red. And for the first time in days and months and years, they are silent, and for the first time in millennia, content.

*

_iii. the now_

There is such a thing as the heartbeat of the universe. The Doctor has explained it to his companions in the past as the time in which the shortest thing that can happen _does_ happen, the brief sliding instant between moments, how _now_ becomes _then_.

He thinks about that, blurrily and through an explosion of fireworks of timelines in his mind, as the Master picks him up, effortless as a rag doll, and takes care in not hurting him, and here it is, _now_ – through sight and sound and the long-remembered, present-and-still-distant, sensation of skin on skin – and the present slips and slides in the spaces between bodies, and time.

It damages the fabric of the cosmos a little, but the Doctor doesn't really mind.

*

In all the possible worlds, the places where things went differently, where there was time, history unfolds. Here, in this place, the Doctor sits on the floor of the _Valiant_, feeling the passage of the bullet through a body, the slowing of a heart, the slowing of another heart, and like a rhythm beating through the ship and the space around it and the universe around that, the sound of drums.

Everything ends, the Doctor said once. When he stands up he's the last Time Lord in the universe.


End file.
